Nikhil's Blog

Learning Shouldn't Be Easy

Most people never acquire meaningful skills beyond their academics. Everything they learn in life is either through forced routine or for promised rewards. What’s missing in most of the people I meet is curiosity. The primary obstacle is their inability to handle the frustrations, uncertainty, and mental fatigue that come with learning something new.

If you have ever acquired a skill or cultivated a habit, you know that everything comes after you cross the threshold of frustration. It’s not a bug — it’s a feature. There comes a point during the learning phase when nothing makes sense, when your brain refuses to move forward without resolving unanswered questions, and the questions keep piling up. At that stage, giving up seems more tempting than continuing, because continuing requires embracing even more frustration.

This is why learning is not fun. All those YouTube videos, podcasts, and bite-sized education apps are fooling you. Learning takes serious effort. You need to align your brain to absorb information, process it, and then derive conclusions from it. As a beginner, you won’t be able to do this smoothly. The frustrating moments are your learning process. Learning is not the “aha” moment — that’s the result. Learning happens in the uncertainty, in the quest for answers, when you are exhausted from thinking and go to sleep hoping your subconscious can figure out the mess in your brain.

Learning more things in life means getting comfortable with frustration. If you aren’t feeling exhausted, you aren’t using your mind to its full potential. Once you understand that this is part of the process, you won’t resist uncertainty. You’ll handle those moments of not knowing with curiosity. You’ll look for new directions from which to fetch your answers.

A self-taught person knows this too well, which is why they build frameworks for themselves — ways to absorb maximum knowledge and move into practice. The frustration you feel from not understanding a subject, even after spending hours or days on it, will always remain. It never goes away. No matter how many subjects you learn or frameworks you build, it only becomes easier to accept — it never disappears.

So embrace the frustration. It’s a sign that your brain is transforming into something new. That frustration is how you learn new things — probably the only way to learn.